When visiting Rebecca's family in February, Hallie "made" me (which I am so GLAD she did!) watch a BBC television show called "The Simple Life". We watched two episodes and I really enjoyed them. Upon returning home, I checked into our local library to see if they had it on their shelves. Sadly, they do not, though I haven't looked into borrowing from another library, nor have I let them know that if they got them for the library, I would certainly check them out. They take suggestions all the time, apparently, so I need to simply turn in the form!

Yes, I know, I'm almost a week late in updating our excursions from last Friday. It's been a very busy week...

Daisy and her family have a membership to The Henry Ford, and she emailed me a couple of weeks ago to see if we'd be interested in visiting Greenfield Village as a Family Friday activity. Her membership allowed us to get in, and to get wristbands for all of the extras for free!

The steep spiral staircase in the lighthouse at Iroquois Point has 72 steps. I climbed them. Twice.

I haven't blogged our Family Fridays in a couple of weeks, but we've still had them. Two Fridays ago, Teri and I geocached our way across Route 30 on our way to Orrville, then joined the girls, and the whole Johnson clan for Emily's Graduation Party and a whole Independence weekend of fun. Last Friday started out with more geocaching and a picnic lunch at Pontiac Lake, then we picked up Saturday afternoon with enough hours at our friends' pool to turn me into lobster man for most of last week.

This week, we started Family Friday a day early, with a drive to my inlaws' cabin in Grayling on Thursday evening. This gave us a good head start on our weekend trip to Sault Sainte Marie.

Dad and Mom have Fridays off all summer, and we wanted to make sure that we didn't just sit around and do nothing, or fill up those Fridays with busyness, so we've declared Family Fridays for the summer. A few Fridays are scheduled for us, like Emily's graduation party, but on our way back from Tom and Tiffany's wedding, we decided to go ahead and plan as many Friday activities as possible. We stopped at the Michigan Welcome Center in Monroe and picked up a whole bunch of flyers, and then added in other items we've wanted to do as well.

Today's activity was a trip to Lansing, where we visited the Michigan Historical Museum. We walked through a couple of centuries of Michigan history in a fairly short time. It would be nice to go back and spend a little more time in a few areas, but at times we were dodging some school tour groups.

There's a very interesting blog post over at Xooglers that gives us a glimpse inside Google's data center, circa 1999.

From Xooglers: Let's talk about U and me:

Imagine an enormous, extremely well-kept zoo, with chain link walls draped from floor to ceiling creating lines of large fenced boxes vanishing somewhere in the far, dark reaches of the Matrix. Inside each cage is a mammoth case (or several mammoth cases) constructed of stylish black metal and glass, crouched on a raised white tile floor into which cables dive and resurface like dolphins. <snip/> Clean, pristine and smoothly sculpted, these were more than machines, they were totems of the Internet economy. Here was eBay. Here Yahoo. Here Inktomi. Welcome to Stonehenge for the Information Age. <snip/> And then we came to Google's cage. Less than 600 square feet, it felt like a shotgun shack blighting a neighborhood of gated mansions. Every square inch was crammed with racks bristling with stripped down CPUs. There were 21 cabinets and more than 1,500 machines, each sprouting cables like Playdoh pushed through a spaghetti press.

Found this today during my morning scan of reddit.com.

From ed-thelen.org:

The Royal Precision Electronic Computer LGP-30 is a general purpose electronic digital computer. The phrase "general purpose" is intended to mean that the computer can solve to any required order of accuracy any mathematical problem expressable in numerical or logical terms. However, for any given computer there are always some problems beyond its practical reach because of the length of time required for their solution. By "electronic" is meant simply that the device uses vacuum tubes and germanium diodes. One way of classifying computers is by the terms analog and digital.

I also found these on reddit.

The first is something I've seen since I first had email. In fact, I think it went around by fax before we had email. The Story of Mel tells of a programmer who worked at the same company that produced the LGP-30 mentioned above:

Mel had written, in hexadecimal, the most popular computer program the company owned. It ran on the LGP-30 and played blackjack with potential customers at computer shows. Its effect was always dramatic. The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show, and the IBM salesmen stood around talking to each other. Whether or not this actually sold computers was a question we never discussed.

One of my wierd tics is that I don't often make smart alek comments in email without researching them first. I was making a crack about Wednesday's report of a huge email fiasco at the UC Berkeley Law School, and wanted to make sure that I had my facts straight before I said that Berkeley was "just the place where the most commonly used email transport in the world, sendmail, was created."

In my search to check this information, I stumbled across The History of the Internet as told on about.com. I've seen a lot of this information before, but I don't think I'd ever seen so much of it strung together in a single article. From what I've seen, about.com tends to get their facts straight, and I'm sure Lu can let us know if any of this information is wrong.

This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:First_Web_Server.jpg

This site is maintained and operated by the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Harrold and Ethel Johnson, two extraordinary people who lived and raised their family in the delightful little town of Orrville, Ohio.

Among us, we are, have been, or have married homemakers, school teachers, hotel managers, manufacturers, office managers, actors, football stars, cheerleaders, church secretaries, Sunday school teachers, computer programmers, network administrators, landscaping laborers, freight handlers, stock clerks, flight attendants, investment bankers, financial advisors, day traders, lobbyists, newspaper editors, chamber of commerce presidents, scrapbooking consultants, graphic artists, landlords and historians. Some of us don't like Democrats because they're too conservative, while some of us think the Republicans are a little too liberal. The rest fall somewhere in between. We live in Virginia, Florida, California, Michigan, and Ohio. Some of us have never lived in Orrville. A few left, only to return. One never moved away.

This web site was born out of the many layers of intrique surrounding the disappearance of TGB in the summer of 1999. Imagine the surprise of the culprit when they received an email from greenbag@thegreenbag.com, claiming to know whodunnit. The culprit played along and began sending photos to help unravel the mystery. A few pictures were posted each day while everyone tried to figure out who had the bag and who was running the web site.

The original series, with full confession at the end, is the only part of the old site that has not been migrated yet, but the old version is available here.

But where is The Green Bag now???